1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical equipment having an audit log managing function which records contents indicating that how and when what was carried out by who during activation of an apparatus as an audit log, saves them or transfers them to the outside in a medical equipment in a hospital.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a medical image apparatus, an operating apparatus, a laboratory test apparatus or any other medical equipment, acquired diagnostic information (image data, information concerning an operation, a test result and others) is managed by using collateral information such as a name of a patient, a patient ID, information concerning the apparatus, a disorder name, a disordered part, a test type, a date and hour of photography and others. Information constituted of the diagnostic information and the collateral information will be referred to as a patient information hereinafter. Necessary information is appropriately read from this patient information and used by a doctor who is in charge of an interpretation diagnosis, a doctor who is in charge of a pathologic diagnosis, a chief physician or the like. Each doctor additionally enters his/her remarks in an electronic medical chart or the like while, e.g., observing the read patient information, thereby realizing sharing of medical information.
In such a medical equipment, in light of protection of privacy of each patient, a history for management of the patient information, which is called an audit log, is recorded in order to verify that personal information of each patient is appropriately processed. Here, the audit log has information concerning an event which has treated the patient information in a medical equipment stored therein in, e.g., a 5W1H style, for example. Further, a file concerning the audit log is called an audit log file. The audit log file is created and then temporarily stored in an apparatus. The audit log file stored in the apparatus is periodically backed up in an external medium, transferred to an external server and managed outside the apparatus by an apparatus manager or a service engineer. The backed-up audit log file is viewed and utilized for an audit by utilizing the apparatus itself, an external computer or the like at a stage of detecting a doubtful action in a given period.
However, in management of a conventional audit log file, the following problems exist, for example.
At first, there is a possibility that a reduction in an apparatus disk capacity is provoked, collection of medical images is inhibited or a state of reducing a test throughput occurs. That is, since an access operation or the like with respect to system information or personal information of each patient during activation of the apparatus is recorded in the audit log file, its data quantity becomes enormous. As a result, a disk full state of a storage medium in the apparatus, loss of a test image, loss of an audit log, an unstable state of the system and others are provoked, which may possibly affects a test operation. Further, usually, it is often the case that an audit log to be recorded is temporarily saved in a local storage medium (in the apparatus), and this problem is of particularly note in an environment adopting this operation.
At second, an operation burden on an apparatus manager or a service engineer is large. That is, in order to avoid the disk full state of the storage medium in the apparatus, a backup operation of an audit log file must be frequently carried out, which imposes a great operation burden on the apparatus manager or the service engineer. This backup operation requires a very long time. Therefore, if an operation of performing backup when a test is not carried out is adopted, an extra duty after test hours becomes a problem. On the other hand, if an operation of performing backup simultaneously with a test is adopted, there is a possibility that a sufficient time cannot be assured for a test.